text:
TNB: Metro-Pointing
A new way to succeed for the truly weird.
Success can mean many things in climbing. For some newbie toproping 5.7 on his first day ever rock climbing, simply reaching
the anchor is an achievement.
"Yeah, I did it!" Newbie invariably yells, as he slaps the anchor like it's a bell on a Japanese game show. Never mind that Newbie fell 40 times because
his footwork was so bad that he may as well have been wearing rollerblades. He reached the top of the climb—physically—and in his mind
is successful.
Mountaineers have always defined success as reaching the summit. That makes sense because reaching summits is a great metaphor for success. (Wait,
which came first?)
Then "alpinists"—the preferred term for mountaineers who are egotistical prigs—came along and pooh-poohed the importance of the summit.
Judging success based on the "arbitrary point" that happens to be the top of the mountain, we're told, is too jejune. In alpinism, success
is all about the experience, and if the experience happens to mean climbing a face to a point on a ridge thousands of feet below
the mountaintop, so be it. Call it a new route and pat yourself on the back.
But often the alpine experience results in total failure to climb up anything at all. That's when definitions get all wishy-washy, and success is transmuted
for a third time to simply mean not dying. Go to the mountains, don't get up shit, but also don't die, and you can call it good. One day the
alpine Brotherhood will spank you with a wooden paddle and you'll be in the club.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is sport climbing and bouldering, where definitions of success aren't quite so amenable. Modern bouldering has devolved
from an activity that involved simply walking around a wild place with a pair of shoes and a chalk bag and trying whatever looked cool into a rather
draconian sport.
Now it seems I can't go bouldering without knowing what holds are "on," or getting called out for "dabbing" when my ass scrapes the ground on the first
move of the sit-start that I'm only trying because the comment fields of 8a.nu scorecards say it gets me one extra V point and is "easy for the grade."
Bouldering is no longer about the freedom to do and climb what you want. Success for today's modish boulderers mandates that they use the exact same holds,
and do the exact same sequence, as the people before them. Anything else is a different problem with a lower grade.
In sport climbing, success is slightly simpler: you start at the bottom of a route and if you can climb to the anchors and clip the rope without falling
or hanging on gear, you win. Unlike alpinism, there are no degrees of success that are based on conditions. You can't claim a real redpoint if weather
moves in and you decide not to climb the second half of a route, even if it is only an easy slog to the chains. In sport climbing, success is cut and
Or is it?
One of my good friends is a guy everyone knows as Metro Mark. And that's the thing: just about everyone seems to know Mark. No real surprise there. Not
only has Mark been a staple on the Circuit for the last 10 years, but he is one of the weirder, and that is to say more unique and memorable, characters
in the climbing world.
I've known Metro Mark for nearly as long as I've been a climber, and from what I can tell, he completely lacks the Success Gene that pumps ego and ambition
hormones into the brains of most redpoint/summit-oriented climbers. The number of routes Metro has almost redpointed is staggering. His talent
and strength as a free climber exceeds his ticklist by fathoms. Instead of redpoints, Metro has accrued a large ticklist of "metro-points." These are
routes he works truly hard at doing, but upon completing just enough of the climb to feel satisfied, he loses interest and foregoes that last crucial
step (clipping the chains) in order to move on to something else.
Metro's approach to climbing is a paradox of hippie determination. In many ways, he makes a mockery of the whole thing, and for this reason some climbers—those
programmed with the Success Gene—find Metro's existence effectively repellent. His very presence in the climbing community raises a rather simple
question that many people will find hard to answer.
Does clipping the chains matter?
The first thing you notice about Metro is that there's nothing all that "metro" about him. Unlike a real metrosexual, Metro doesn't wear man-make-up or
keep Bluetooth man-jewelry in his ear. He has a "nicer" fleece that he wears out to restaurants, and he prefers Chacos to Brooks Brothers. His harness
droops from his waist like a low-drop belt and holster, and the leg loops dangle loosely just above his knees. Sure, sometimes his climbing shorts
hang so low that it looks like they're about to fall below the pubic bone (no, no underwear), and he sometimes walks around crags in between burns
wearing a big down jacket unzipped and with nothing underneath save for two perky nipples poking out, but I wouldn't call that metrosexual,
per se. More like Tarzan-sexual.
I met Mark years ago during my first pilgrimage to Climbing Mecca, Yosemite. This was toward the end of my trip, and I was thrashed, trashed and sick of
rationing one packet of oatmeal every morning for breakfast in Camp 4. I splurged by going to the Lodge café and getting enough pancakes and bacon
to make a lumberjack upchuck. I sat down at a table alone to enjoy my delicious hot meal, and upon looking up from my first bite of food, found a random
hippie with long hair tied back in a ponytail sitting with me.
"Don't look over there," he said.
"Where?" I said, looking.
"OK, they're gone." He scurried over to a table of freshly abandoned café trays, shoveled some syrup-logged food on a plate, and brought it back to my
"I'm Mark," he said. "People call me Metro. Do you think it's still safe to use my Grigri? I dropped it off the second pitch of Zodiac. I mean,
it looks fine."
I'd be in the middle of a sentence, and Mark would just get up and go after another piece of forsaken bacon he'd spied from across the room. He was—and
often is—adrift in his own world of anxiety. I quickly realized how difficult it is to have a "normal" conversation with him.
No matter where I climbed over the course of the next seven years—Yosemite, the VRG, the Red, El Potrero, Rifle, Joe's Valley, the Gunks, and so
on—Metro Mark was always there. I couldn't take a climbing trip without bumping into him. It was a weird coincidence at first; then
I just assumed it would happen in the same way not bringing a jacket causes it to rain.
One of the best reasons to sign up for this resonant thing called the Climbing Lifestyle is to play a role in an expansive cast of unconventional characters.
Climbers are fringe people by nature, and at the periphery of our little circle you find the fringe of the fringe—true weirdness. Metro Mark
seemed to have been on the road, climbing, for as long as people have been road tripping. He embodied everything I did and did not want from climbing.
He had the freedom to climb anywhere and everywhere, but it was also an existence that didn't seem to provide him any of the answers or balance that
I sought.
Now, don't get me wrong. I think being weird is one of the best attributes to find in another person.
"Genuine weirdness is a rare quality," wrote the artist Ralph Steadman. "To be truly weird demands character and a wanton disregard for the social mores
of the day."
While our society is built on the idea that individual expression and development is fostered, in fact the opposite is true. Everything about modern life
is driving us to be more similar, less individual. We are pushed by forces too tremendous to understand into roles, categories and ideologies, and
in the process, whatever is individual and weird about ourselves gets crushed.
Climbing has always existed in my mind as a haven from the traditional molds, but even in this sport that we'd like to think is fringe, the same patterns
and forces emerge. Climbers assume roles and character traits associated with the disciplines they practice.
Still, I must admit that true weirdness is extremely unsettling to be around. Nine years later, though, Metro's quirky Metro mannerisms are something I
have come to appreciate. There are so many good Metro stories, it's hard to know where to start.
One time, Metro told a circle of climbers not to worry about not seeing him at the crag next weekend; his landlord, Jared Ogden, had landed him a gig as
an "underwear model." This was ironic, of course, since we didn't think Metro wore underwear. Also, no one I know has ever seen photos from the shoot,
so it's difficult to say what Metro got up to that one day in his underwear in front of a camera lens.
Metro drives more miles to go climbing than anyone I know. He can do a six-month road trip in four days and climb everywhere along the way. He doesn't
see why a crag that's 22 hours away isn't a good weekend destination. Last year, during a seven-day break from college, he put 15,000 miles on his
Toyota Tundra by visiting Colorado Springs, Hueco, the Enchanted Tower, Las Vegas, St. George, and Rifle.
Another time, Metro went over to my friend Dan's house. That day, Metro had "over-Pilatecized," or done too many Pilates exercises, and his stomach felt
upset. Dan said Metro could lie down in his bed, so Mark did. Then Dan got a call on his cell phone from Metro—who, keep in mind, was in the
same house, upstairs—and he wanted to know if Dan wouldn't mind bringing him a little dinner to eat in bed.
He has come close to sending some impressive trad climbs, including the Six Star Crack (5.13b) in Indian Creek and the Shadow Pitch (5.13b)
in Squamish. He has blown the anchor clips on his first 5.13b, 5.13c and 5.13d, and hasn't gone back to finish those routes.
An average day for Mark at Rifle involves one-hanging the infamously pumpy Living in Fear (5.13d) between three and six times in a row, and then
trying at least five other routes in the 5.13d to 5.14b range—and one hanging them too.
Metro has even done Free Rider, the 5.12d free climb on El Cap … with one hang. That's not to say that Metro is without any "legit" accomplishments.
In the last six months, he has done a few 5.13a's, and two V11's and four V10's. He has officially redpointed at least one 5.13c, Path, at
Rifle, but that was after a group intervention of friends got together and begged him to please just clip the chains on one hard route.
Metro also likes creating his own special challenges. He's more interested in trying to link two different routes together, or add a bouldering traverse
into the start of a sport route. He proudly recalls adding a "sit-start" to the 20-foot 5.12c Handy Boy, as well as the entirely pointless
10-foot ground-level traverse into the start of the 20-foot route Ruckus (5.12b), both at Rifle. I wouldn't be surprsed if a sit-start to
Free Rider is next.
Silly, yes. But, why not? Dani Andrada did precisely the same thing in the Ali Baba cave to produce one of the world's hardest routes. At least the precedent
was there.
One of Metro's most endearing qualities is that he always sees the best in people and situations. When Metro fails to redpoint, he is never bummed
out by it. Even after falling on Living in Fear at the exact same spot for the hundredth time, he'll say something like, "Well, that was closer!"
What's interesting is how that ebullient optimism and congratulatory approach to what is technically failure affects others. The very things that most
sport climbers find to be so agonizing—eternal one hanging and never being able to break through and succeed with a redpoint—are the things
that give Metro some degree of satisfaction. And in this self-satisfaction, Metro acts as a mirror that reflects a few things that the hyper-driven
sport climber doesn't like about himself, namely that he has let succeeding on a stupid route take on exaggerated proportions.
I often wonder if the reason Metro has metro-pointed so many routes and redpointed so few is that he allows himself to be happy and content with his half-successes
and one hangs. And if so, is that a good thing … or not?
At the end of the day, however, clipping the chains does matter. Reaching summits does matter. The final point, as arbitrary and unimportant
as it may truly be, gives meaning to the act in the first place. I know all of this, yet I can't help but appreciate Metro for inadvertently showing
everyone that what we do as climbers is inherently a little dumb and totally unimportant. At the end of the day, as climbing becomes more orthodox
and climbers become more homogeneous, I'm thankful to see that true weirdness can still thrive.


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Yahoo takes big leap with $1.1B deal for Tumblr
By Michael Liedtke, AP Technology Writer Associated Press SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Yahoo is buying online blogging forum Tumblr for $1.1 billion as CEO Marissa Mayer tries to rejuvenate an Internet icon that had fallen behind the times. The deal ann...
By Michael Liedtke, AP Technology Writer Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Yahoo is buying online blogging forum Tumblr for $1.1 billion as CEO Marissa Mayer tries to rejuvenate an Internet icon that had fallen behind the times.
The deal announced Monday represents Mayer's boldest move yet since she left Google 10 months ago to lead Yahoo's latest comeback attempt. It marks Yahoo's most expensive acquisition since the Sunnyvale, Calif., company bought online search engine Overture a decade ago for $1.3 billion in cash and stock.
Yahoo is paying all cash for Tumblr, dipping into some of its remaining stash from a $7.6 billion windfall reaped last year from selling about half of its stake in Chinese Internet company Alibaba Holdings Group. Taking over Tumblr will devour about one-fifth of the $5.4 billion in cash that Yahoo had in its accounts at the end of March.
While hailing Tumblr as fount of creativity that attracts 300 million visitors per month, Yahoo pledged "not to screw it up." David Karp, a high school dropout who started Tumblr six years ago, will remain in control of the service in an effort to retain the same "irreverence, wit and commitment to empower creators," Yahoo said.
Karp, 26, who may now have a managerial mentor in Mayer, 37. Tumblr, which will remain based in New York, has about 175 employees while Yahoo has 11,300 workers.
Mayer, who worked closely with Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had high praise for Karp in a statement. She described him "as one of the most perceptive, capable entrepreneurs I've ever worked with."
In his statement, Karp predicted Yahoo would help Tumblr grow even faster as he strives "to make the Internet the ultimate creative canvas. "
Tumblr now figures to play a pivotal role in Mayer's attempt to reshape Yahoo. To take on the challenge, Mayer ended a highly successful 13-year career at Google, which she helped surpass Yahoo as the Internet's most influential company. Since coming to Yahoo, Mayer has concentrated on improving employee morale, redesigning services and bringing in more engineering talent through a series of small acquisitions that have collectively cost less than $50 million.
Her efforts have been well-received on Wall Street so far, although most of the 69 percent surge in Yahoo's stock price under Mayer's leadership has been driven by the rising value of Yahoo's remaining 24 percent in Alibaba. When Alibaba goes public within the next few years, analysts have estimated Yahoo could collect another $10 billion to $20 billion by selling the rest of its Alibaba stock.
If this deal pays off the way Mayer envisions, Tumbler could help Yahoo finally get its stock price to $33. That would be a major coup because many investors soured on Yahoo after a previous regime led by co-founder Jerry Yang squandered an opportunity five years ago to sell the entire company to Microsoft for $33 per share. The stock spent more than four years trading below $20 before the recent surge that lifted the price to $26.52 through last week.
The deal could backfire though if Yahoo's effort to make more money alienate a Tumblr user base that so far has been subjected to hardly any advertising during the service's six-year history.
"Yahoo has to manage this acquisition in a way that keeps Tumblr's user base while trying to add advertising, which historically tends to turn off a lot of people," said Forrester Research analyst Zachary Reiss-Davis.
Yahoo said it will work with Tumblr to create ads that "are seamless and enhance the user experience."
Mayer is betting that Tumblr will provide Yahoo with a captivating hook to reel in more traffic and advertisers on smartphones and tablet computers. That rapidly growing market is expected to become even more important during the next decade as people increasingly consume digital content on mobile devices instead of laptop and desktop machines.
Besides offering one of the top mobile apps, Tumblr also runs one of the world's busiest websites, featuring 75 million daily posts about everything from politics to pets. Advertising has been a missing ingredient so far as Tumblr, like many online services in their early stages, focused on building a loyal audience before turning its attention to making money.
The deal also has some symbolic significance for Yahoo, an 18-year-old company that had spent much of the past decade aimlessly drifting under different management teams while Google Inc. overtook it in terms of size and influence. At the same time, newcomers such as Facebook Inc. and Twitter began to command the attention of people who found themselves spending less and less time on Yahoo.
Part of Yahoo's problems stemmed from missed chances to improve its service and technology.
Yahoo flirted with potential acquisitions of Google and Facebook in those two companies' early days, only to have the talks unravel because Yahoo wasn't prepared to pay asking prices that were far below the current market values of Google ($300 billion) and Facebook ($63 billion). Yahoo also considered buying YouTube in 2006, only to be outbid by Google, which snapped up the world's leading online service for $1.76 billion - a price that now looks like a bargain.
Even when Yahoo did pull off deals, the company has been criticized for mismanaging a list of acquired services that includes photo-sharing Flickr, online help-wanted service HotJobs and content-sharing service Del.icio.us. Yahoo ended up selling HotJobs and Del.icio.us, but Mayer has been looking at ways to spruce up Flickr and blend its photos into more of Yahoo's other services. Mayer is expected to discuss more changes for Flickr at an event in New York Monday evening.
Tumblr could help Yahoo recapture some of its cachet with teens and adults in their early 20s, a demographic that has become tougher for Yahoo to reach in recent years as it fell behind the technological curve and struggled to develop compelling services.
While Facebook has turned into a mainstream social network where even grandparents now connect family and friends, Tumblr has become one of the places where the cool kids hang out.
"Tumblr is redefining creative expression online," Mayer said. "On many levels, Tumblr and Yahoo! couldn't be more different, but, at the same time, they couldn't be more complementary."
Tumblr emerged as a trendy online hangout by providing a service that makes it easy to share blog posts, photos, video and other content in an enthralling mosaic. The service says it has amassed more than 50 billion posts from 108 million blogs. Tumblr users rely on a dashboard to pinpoint the kinds of blogs that they want to track and also have tools to pass along the posts that interest them.
That wealth of content could be interwoven into Yahoo's other services that provide coverage of general news, sports, finance and entertainment. Tumblr also will fill Yahoo's gaping void in the realm of social media. Yahoo so far has had to connect its services to Facebook and Twitter to give its users a social networking outlet.
Having its own social networking service will also give Yahoo more insights into the things that people like - a key to distributing ads to consumers most likely to be interested in a specific products. That data, in turn, should help Yahoo sell more ads and accelerate its revenue growth. After three successive years of declines, Yahoo's revenue rose slightly last year, but lagged far behind the growth at Google and Facebook. Mayer has vowed to bring Yahoo's revenue growth back to at least the level of the overall Internet ad market.
Yahoo's acquisition will deliver a jackpot to Karp, who dropped out of high school to concentrate on computer programming. He ended up being home schooled while taking classes in Japanese and working on gambling software. Later, he became a product executive at a parenting website called UrbanBaby. After CNet bought the site in 2006, Karp set up his own a development service called "Davidville" before deciding to create an outlet for personal expression - an endeavor that hatched Tumblr.
Karp's cut from the Yahoo deal is about $275 million. Most of the rest of the money will be paid to the venture capitalists that invested about $125 million into Tumblr. That list includes Spark Capital, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, Union Square Ventures and Insight Venture Partners.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Cubs proved they're the less-bad team
In the 11 seasons in which the Crosstown Series has meant something, there had never been a beatdown quite like this.
All right, it wasn't exactly the best baseball in the world, and it might have been a down-and-out White Sox team that the Cubs pounded on, but it's not like the North Siders went into U.S. Cellular Field looking like a juggernaut.
By the time they left after Sunday's 3-0 win, though, there was no doubt which was the less bad team.
The Cubs (35-39) never trailed during the series, held the Sox (29-45) to just two runs over the three games and swept a series on the South Side for the first time in the rivalry's existence.
"They played the crap out of us," said Sox manager Ozzie Guillen, whose team has lost 22 of its last 27 games. "They outplayed us this weekend. They did ...
"They made the plays, they pitched right, they had clutch hitting and we didn't. They played a hell of a weekend. We have to admit it. If those guys keep playing the way they did against us this weekend, they have a chance."
The Cubs, who also won two of three from the Sox in mid-May, became the first Chicago team ever to win five games in the "el series" in one season.
"Oh, man, we had a very good weekend here," said Alfonso Soriano, who homered in all three games over the weekend, including a seventh-inning solo shot Sunday that made it 2-0. "I hope we can continue it."
The Cubs again scored first - though it took a little longer this time than in the first two games of the series, when Soriano hit leadoff homers. Sunday, it was Angel Pagan's RBI groundout in the sixth that gave the Cubs a 1-0 lead.
Against this Sox team, that was all starter Sean Marshall (4-2) and his successors needed. The left-hander threw 6 1/3 scoreless innings before being pulled after 81 pitches because manager Lou Piniella said he was tiring.
"We came in here, the South Side, and held this team to two runs in three games," Piniella said. "That's pretty darn good pitching. And today was no exception."
Or it could be bad hitting - depending on how one looks at it.
"Their pitchers threw well, and again, we're not one of the best offensive teams - in fact, we're dead last," Sox captain Paul Konerko said. "But that's not to say their guys didn't throw well, either."
The Cubs increased their lead to 3-0 after a wild play in the eighth. With two on and nobody out, Mark DeRosa hit a ball over right fielder Rob Mackowiak's head. Felix Pie tagged up at second in case the ball was caught, but Pagan ran full steam from first to second, creating a logjam on the basepaths. The Sox eventually got what appeared to be a double play, tagging Pagan out at second and catching Pie in a rundown between third and home.
But shortstop Juan Uribe, who had made contact with Pagan, was ruled to have committed obstruction, and the umpiring crew ruled that it was a dead ball as soon as Pagan was tagged. Pagan was awarded second base, Pie was sent to third and DeRosa to first, giving the Cubs the bases loaded with nobody out.
Guillen went out, argued and asked to get ejected. He was. Acting manager Joey Cora went out to protest but didn't know what he was protesting. That didn't work.
The Cubs eventually made it 3-0 on Koyie Hill's sacrifice fly to center.
"One thing, we didn't lose the game because of that," Guillen said.
No, they lost the game, the series and perhaps some players - general manager Ken Williams said before the game that changes needed to be made - because of the Cubs pitching and/or their own lack of hitting.
"They outplayed the White Sox for three games," said Sox starter Jose Contreras (5-8), who allowed two runs in seven innings. "You have to give credit where credit is due."
More Cubs and Sox coverage can be found online at www.dailysouthtown.com/sports.


text:
Climbers on the world's highest mountain have been particularly challenged this season -- not by altitude, weather or even the stream of guided climbers who clog the camps and flanks of Everest like cholesterol in the artery to the summit. This season the crux could be getting past the cops now posted around the base and at Camp II (21,300 feet) on the Nepal side.
Climbers on the world's highest mountain have been particularly challenged this season — not by altitude, weather or even the stream of guided climbers who clog the camps and flanks of Everest like cholesterol in the artery to the summit. This season the crux could be getting past the cops now posted around the base and at Camp II (21,300 feet) on the Nepal side. The peak has been commandeered by the government of China, host of the 2008 Olympics, and will be closed to climbing until the Olympic torch is taken to the summit on its relay to Beijing.
Not only have climbers been prevented from making summit bids on the Nepal side (the Chinese-controlled Tibetan side is completely closed to private expeditions this season) during the best weather window, May 1 through 10, they have had their bags searched and "non-essential" expedition materials have been confiscated.
Members of a Canadian expedition reported losing laptops, satellite phones and camera equipment. Video cameras are specifically banned from basecamp, and a spokesman for the Nepali Home Ministry, Mod Raj Dotel, stated that "anyone found with anti-Chinese material" will have his or her permit cancelled.
This is the first time that security forces have been deployed on Everest. Dotel says, "They have been ordered to use force if necessary to stop any anti-Chinese activities. This could mean shooting if necessary."
The hard-line rhetoric and threats of violence come after weeks of pro-Tibet protests coinciding with stops on the Olympic torch relay, notably in Paris, London and San Francisco, where tens of thousands of demonstrators turned out to denounce China's violent annexation of Tibet in 1950 and subsequent human rights abuses, which have included the killing, rape and torture of Buddhist nuns and monks.
On September 30, 2006, a young nun was shot and killed by Chinese border guards close to the climbing basecamp on Cho Oyu. She was one of over 70 people attempting to cross a pass and enter Nepal to escape persecution in Chinese-occupied Tibet. Thirty refugees were captured and sent to prison, and climbers (including Americans) were sequestered, searched and interrogated.
Predictably, many climbers are incensed, citing possible dangerous logjams brought on by the reduced weather window. In an interview with the German paper Frankfurter Rundschau, Italian alpine superstar Reinhold Messner called the torch relay to the top of Everest a farce.
"China is to blame for this mess," said Messner, who climbed Everest alone and unsupported in 1980 without supplemental oxygen. Why do they have to take the Olympic flame up there in the first place?"
Mountaineers are also taking an ideological stance in favor of Tibet. The prominent French Groupe de Haute Montagne (GHM) has asked that all national and international mountaineering associations, clubs, guides and mountaineers stand against this ascent and publicly condemn it.
The GHM stated: The Olympic torch on Everest is completely inappropriate, offensive for the Tibetan population, degrading for the Himalaya in general and Everest in particular."
Six-time summiteer and senior Everest guide Luis Benitez agrees. "The reason I canceled going to Everest this year is simple: China. It was hard for me to walk away. Everest was where I made the majority of my pay for the year. But I knew I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I chose to go and be silenced by China. Maybe after this, someone, somewhere will start to pay more attention, and have the power to impact change."
1936 BERLIN. Adolph Hitler conceived the idea of running a torch from Greece to the Olympic Stadium to create a mysterious and intimidating aura surrounding his Nazi Regime. His propaganda team also invented the five interlocking rings symbol.
1956 MELBOURNE. Nine Australian students, protesting the torch's Nazi origins, successfully presented a fake torch made of a chair leg and a burning pair of underpants to the mayor of Sydney.
2008 BEIJING. Pro-Tibet demonstrations in London, Paris and San Francisco disrupted the intended torch route and even caused the torch to be extinguished at times.
POLITICAL: In 1950 China sent 40,000 troops into Tibet in an act of unprovoked aggression. In 1959, the Tibetans revolted and over 87,000 were killed. Some 1.2 million Tibetans have been killed by the Chinese since 1950, according to the Free Tibet Campaign. Each year around 2,500 Tibetans cross the Himalaya as refugees.
AGRICULTURAL: Forced agricultural modernizations led to extensive crop failures and Tibet's first recorded famine (1960 to 1962), in which 340,000 Tibetans died. CULTURAL: Chinese has now replaced Tibetan as the official language. Since 1994, the Chinese have used a distorted, pro-Chinese history program to educate young Tibetans.
ENVIRONMENTAL: Sources estimate that half of Tibet's natural forests have been logged since the Chinese occupation. China admits to dumping nuclear waste on the Tibetan plateau near its largest lake, Lake Kokonor. The Indian government reports three nuclear missile sites on Tibetan territory.
RELIGIOUS: China continues to attempt to discredit Tibet's secular and religious leader in exile, The Dalai Lama.


text:
A new ARM-based Linux PC with a host of capabilities—including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, two Gigabit Ethernet jacks, and five USB ports—goes on sale next month starting at $99.
"Utilite," offered by Israeli company CompuLab, won't be as cheap as a Raspberry Pi, but the specs justify the cost. With dimensions of 5.3" × 3.9" × 0.8", Utilite comes with a Freescale i.MX6 system-on-chip with a single-, dual-, or quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor (which uses 3-8 watts of power). It will have up to 4GB of DDR3 1066MHz memory, up to 512GB of SSD storage, and a microSD slot allowing another 128GB.
The PC can be purchased with either Ubuntu Linux or Android.
The rest of the specs are as follows:
- Graphics Processing Unit supporting OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0, OpenVG 1.1, and OpenCL EP
- Video Processing Unit supporting multi-stream 1080p H.264, VC1, RV10, and DivX decoding
- HDMI 1.4 up to 1920×1200 @ 60Hz
- DVI-D up to 1920×1200 @ 60Hz
- Two Gigabit Ethernet ports
- Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n
- Bluetooth 3.0
- Stereo line-out and stereo line-in
- S/PDIF (electrical through 3.5 mm jack)
- Four USB2.0 high-speed ports, 480 Mbit/s
- USB OTG port, 480 Mbit/s
- Two RS232 serial ports, ultra mini serial connector
CompuLab says it envisions Utilite being used for applications such as a "media player, IPTV, infotainment system, digital signage, thin client, and [as a] small-footprint desktop replacement."
CompuLab and its resellers will start accepting orders for the little computer in August. Full pricing wasn't announced, with CompuLab saying only that "Utilite will be offered in several configurations starting from $99."
Utilite is a follow-up to CompuLab's previous PC, the Nvidia Tegra 2-based Trim-Slice. That computer ranges in price from $213 to $338.


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Cake by Courtney
Sign up for my new 3-month online Cake Camp!
Home » The Best Crowd Pleasing Ultimate S'mores Cake » court_65
by Courtney Rich
Published on June 13, 2021
I'm a self-taught baker, obsessed with cake.
I long ago ditched box mixes in pursuit of melt-in-your-mouth, to-die-for flavor combinations, fillings and textures. I believe cake must be decadent, life-changing and worthy of celebration! And I believe anyone should be able to bake that kind of cake – and I'm here to teach you just that!
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